Arik's Ark

The Web is not the natural habitat of the emotionally lit- erate, a demographic that only serves to augment the poignancy of Rebecca Bat-Raphael's Dedication site . Set up in memory of her son Arik - kidnapped and murdered by Hamas in 1994 - the site demonstrates how well the Web allows a private milieu to be transferred into the public domain with minimal loss of intimacy.

Highlighting the waymarks in Arik's life, this site invites you to share, and yet not intrude upon, Bat-Raphael's grief and bewilderment. A visit to Dedication, part of Bat-Raphael's online "Ark", is an intense and cathartic experience.

Even as Bat-Raphael invites the world to share her anguish, she also displays a forgiving nature. Beneath a photograph of a youthful Arik, she writes, "As a firm believer in peace between all people I could never envisage any violent revenge. But if we wish to change the future we need to remember the past."

And also a generous one. As an added, slightly jarring bonus, Dedication is linked to an Electronic Shadchenter. A shadchenter, pronounced "shad' chan" with a "ch" as in "loch", is a Jewish matchmaker, and the site does exactly that. Arik had a sense of humour, and his mother thinks he'd have liked hosting a dating agency.

- Liz Bailey

  Research, Smearch...

Bah, humbug. You can keep your real-time views of university condom machines and your interactive, personalised birthday cake selectors. For me, a site has to earn its keep on an everyday, practical level to survive my monthly bookmark massacre.

EF Bridge has got what it takes. Set up by an enterpris- ing phalanx of Finns (what do they feed these Finns?), this online English-French-English translator is a doddle to use. It's also admirably comprehensive, recognising even the fruitiest examples of street parlance. Putain!

Dictionary, smictionary, I hear you cry. Your Harrap's Concise does you just fine, merci beaucoup. Well, this site will also supply you with the kosher pronunciation of any word in the form of an audio clip. Despite a lot of coaching, my own copy of Harrap's couldn't live with that and has now been exiled to the bottom drawer.

Come to think of it, the past couple of months have seen several other weighty tomes evicted from my desk. The latest batch got the boot shortly after I discovered info-junkie nirvana, aka Research-It! .

Okay, so producing a list of input forms to a heap of other folks' online reference resources isn't groundbreaking HTML - but this is a stack like no other. Not only does it include a full-on English dictionary, a tasty Roget's Thesaurus and a multitude of multilingual translators, it also features online maps, stock quotes, a US phone directory, geographical data, a currency converter, various parcel-tracking services and, for a little light relief, an anagram solver. Praise be, it even has an online Bible concordance. So if you can't find an answer, you can pray for one.

- Phil Gyford

  You Can Bank on the Web...

Telephone banking changed my life. Following a savaging as a student at the hands of a psychotic bank manger, setting foot inside a bank had become a terrifying ordeal. Then came First Direct, and my life was suddenly an whole heap less stressful.

Web banking is the stunningly obvious next step. I long for the day when I can manage all my financial affairs from my PC. Given that the UK market for home banking has been estimated at six million people, it would seem that I am not alone. What's more, most UK banks have the required IT infrastructure already in place: at this very moment, bank telephone services operators employ exactly those applications and databases that could be easily adapted to produce personalised Web banking pages.

Several UK banks are fiddling with PC banking systems, most notably Barclays, currently midway through a nationwide PC banking trial. But UK banks are focusing on proprietary dial-up systems - dinosaur fodder now that the Web has gone critical. Predictably, US banks understand this rather better. The Kentucky-based Security First Network Bank has been blazing the Web banking trail for an online eternity. Well, since October 1995, anyway. SFNBhas already notched up over 3,000 accounts, and looks set to grow exponentially on the back of lower operating costs than those of its off-line rivals.

Mainland Europe, too, has leapt aboard the Web bank- wagon. German Compuserve wannabe T-Online states that the HYPO home banking facility is its most popular service. Several French banks are contemplating transferring their existing Minitel-based banking services onto the Web.

All these banks have appreciated that a sizable potential customer base of high-income, wired thirtysomethings are already online, and that now is the time to experiment. So why are the UK banks dragging their heels? Surprise, surprise: they're scared, citing the old chestnut of unspecified "security worries" as an excuse for their sloth.

But, hey, never mind; it will take just one enterprising soul to set up a tax-efficient Web Swiss bank to trigger a stampede online.

- Tom Loosemore

  Java to the People!

Adam Freeman spent the winter hidden in the bowels of the Open University's new Knowledge Media Institute. Like programmers around the globe, he was grappling with Java. Now that the warmth of summer threatens to descend upon us, he has emerged into the sunshine proudly clutching one of the most sophisticated Java applets to date.

Developed as an experiment in very large-scale telepresence, Stadium employs a Java client and RealAudio to bring the experience of a stadium-based lecture right to your desktop. You can submit questions, and then respond to the speaker by clapping, booing and hissing. Best of all, you can determine your own appearance before joining the "crowd" (I've always visualised myself as a voluptuous redhead...) and chat to other participants "standing" near you, before inviting them to join you for a more intimate discussion in a virtual bar. Students learn as much from talking to other students as they do from organised tuition, so the virtual bar attempts to draw the OU's distance learners into this informal learning loop. Apparently.

Freeman will use Stadium to teach Java to software engineers at British Telecom's Advanced Technology Lab - a proposal that incorporates a certain symmetrical appeal! Stadium proves that there's an awful lot more to Java than naff rotating logos and glitchy hangman applets. It's going to be one long, hot, Java-packed summer.

- Tom Loosemore